The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea (best fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

human beings living too close to one another. It had rained last night, but not enough to clean the streets, and the scavenging pigs—Daoud's heightened senses could hear and smell them, too—could not keep up with the garbage and sewage produced by the overcrowded people of Orvieto.

But he need not remain in Orvieto. He raised his head and lifted[315] the chain that held the silver locket about his neck. Turning the little screw that fastened the lid of the locket, he let it fall open. It covered most of the palm of his right hand. Holding the crystal disk backed by silver close to his eyes, he saw his face reflected back at him from the convex surface. His image was broken up by a pattern etched into the transparency, a five-part webwork of interlocking angles and boxes, spirals and concentric circles. The pattern formed a maze too complex for the eye to grasp. He believed that the man who used a stylus, doubtless diamond-pointed, to cut the design into the crystal must have gone blind in the course of his work. No mosque bore a more intricate—or more beautiful—pattern on its walls.

His eyes, as they always did when he looked into the locket, tried to follow the pattern and became lost in it. As the drug extended its empire within him, it seemed that he could actually see his eyes, coalesced into a single eye, staring back at him from the net of lines and whorls that entrapped it.

The captive eye means that the locket now controls what I see.

He saw the face of Sophia Karaiannides. Her dark lips, luscious as red grapes, were parted slightly, showing even, white teeth. Her thick-lashed eyelids were half lowered over burning eyes. Her hair hung unbound in brunette waves on either side of her face. She had splashed water on her face, and the droplets gleamed on her cheeks and brow like jewels.

Daoud had no doubt that he was seeing her exactly as she was at this moment, somewhere else in the cardinal's mansion. The locket had that property.

But I do not want to see Sophia. I want Blossoming Reed.

Then Sophia spoke to him. "Oh, David, why will you not come to my bed?"

Her voice was rich as velvet. His muscles tensed with a sudden hunger, a long-felt need that Francesca, the woman he bedded with now and then at Tilia Caballo's, could never satisfy. Sophia, he realized, could give him what he wanted, what he missed so terribly since leaving home.

No! Let me see Blossoming Reed.

He shut his eyes, and Sophia was still looking at him. The locket and the drug together could show a man things he did not want to see, make him feel things he did not want to feel. Things that were inside him that he did not want to know.[316]

The knowledge you run from is the most precious of all, Saadi had said.

I know I want Sophia. I do not hide that from myself. But I cannot have her. Let me therefore see my wife, Blossoming Reed, she who gave me this locket.

Sophia's image faded now, and he saw again the crystal and its pattern that caught his soul like a fish in its toils. Gradually the pattern became the face of Blossoming Reed. Sparks flashed from her slanting eyes, painted with black rings of kohl. Her wide mouth was a downturned crescent of scorn. The nostrils of her hawklike nose flared proudly. There was a message in her face. What did she know, and what was she trying to tell him?

Blossoming Reed, daughter of Baibars and a Canaanite wife Baibars had stolen from the crusader stronghold in Sidon. It was rumored that Blossoming Reed's mother practiced a kind of sorcery that was ancient even when the Hebrews were in bondage in Egypt. But would Baibars, the mightiest defender of the faith since Saladin, allow devil-worship in his own house? Daoud could not believe it.

And yet, what was this locket if not the work of some evil magician? He would not have touched the thing, much less worn it, had it not come from Blossoming Reed, whom he loved.

Blossoming Reed, betrothed to him at twelve, married to him at fourteen, whose breasts were like oranges and whose nails flayed his back in their lovemaking. Blossoming Reed, Baibars's gift of honor to him, seal and symbol of eternal friendship between Baibars al-Bunduqdari and Daoud ibn Abdallah.

Blossoming Reed, who now spoke to him in anger out of the magic of hashish and the locket.

Go back to the Well, Daoud!

Back to the Well?

To the Well of Goliath?

He saw again the plain of tamarisk, thorn bush, and grass, and the long black line of charging Tartars. Eagerly Daoud leaned forward in the saddle. Tightly he gripped his bow.

Now, devils, now you will pay for Baghdad!

He had relived that day, the greatest battle of his life, hundreds of times in thoughtful moments, in dreams, in hashish visions. What he saw now were moments that seemed to leap at him out of the darkness.

[317]

Screaming a war cry and brandishing a scimitar, a Tartar galloped at him. They were in open ground. Daoud circled away, sheathing his saif and pulling his bow from its case. The Tartar chased him, guiding his horse with his knees and firing arrow after arrow at Daoud. But he was in too much of a hurry. He was not aiming carefully, and all the arrows whistled over Daoud's head.

The muscles of the black Yemenite stallion bunched and stretched under Daoud as its hooves thundered over the plain. He stood in the saddle. He turned and took aim along the shaft of his arrow at the center of the Tartar's chest. The arrow went low, to Daoud's annoyance, and struck the Tartar in the side of the stomach. But he must have been wearing light leather armor, for the arrow with its steel point went deep into him. The Tartar gave a short cry and dropped his bow, then fell, like a stone, from the saddle into the sand.

Daoud wheeled his Yemenite about, then jerked the horse to a stop and jumped from the saddle with his saif out. The Tartar had somehow risen to all fours, but was vomiting blood into the sand. Daoud kicked him with his red-booted foot and rolled him over on his back.

Holding his saif high, he looked into the face of Nicetas, contorted with pain and fear.

"Oh, God!" he whispered. "Oh, God, no!"

He stood paralyzed. Their eyes met.

Nicetas said, "You have to."

"God be merciful to me," Daoud said, and brought the saif down.

XXVIII

Lorenzo's eyes ached as he stared through a peephole in the doorway of a storeroom into the common room of the inn called the Angel. Alternating his left and right eye at intervals, he stared at a bench by the opposite wall, where a hooded figure sat alone, holding a cup of wine in his lap. As Lorenzo had instructed him,[318] the tavern keeper had put a lighted candle in a sconce near where Sordello was sitting, so that Lorenzo could watch his quarry.

The candle beside Sordello was one of only four in the common room—just light enough for the innkeeper to be certain he was paid in honest coin while making it hard for his patrons to see the color of his wine. It was early evening, and there were only about six men and women in the room. All of them except Sordello sat on benches at the one long table near the wine barrel. Sordello, leaning against the rough-hewn wooden wall, had to set his cup beside him.

The mercenary's square hand lifted the painted pottery cup into the shadow of his hood. Lorenzo knew Sordello was under the tightly drawn hood only because he had followed him diligently through the tangle of Orvieto's streets from the house where a dozen of the brigosi Lorenzo had recruited were quartered.

Daoud's secret army was growing. The evening after the contessa's reception Lorenzo had sealed a bargain with Marco di Filippeschi, who was ready to help Daoud against the alliance if it meant striking a blow against the Monaldeschi.

Before any plans were made, though, there remained the question of Sordello.

A stout woman in a black gown came into the common room of the Angel and went straight to the hooded man. The lower part of her face was covered by a black scarf. Anyone watching the hooded Sordello and the veiled lady would think theirs was just everyday wickedness—an adulterous couple meeting for an assignation. She sat beside him on the bench. Their heads drew together, and Lorenzo, behind a door across the room, was too far away to hear.

Lorenzo heard a scratching behind him. He turned, but it was too dark even to see movement.

Rats, he thought. This work continually brings a man into the company of rats. Four-legged rats and men like Sordello. He put his eye to the peephole again, just in time to see a slip of paper disappear into the woman's deep sleeve. Whoever Sordello was reporting to, he was putting it in writing. Interesting that the man could write. That put him a cut above the average bravo, in education, at least.

The innkeeper came over to offer the woman wine, but she waved him away without looking at him. She stood up, brushing the seat of her gown fastidiously, like one who was used to sitting in cleaner surroundings. Without a gesture or a handclasp she left Sordello as quickly as she had come. Nothing loverlike about those two.[319]

Lorenzo decided to follow the woman, and left by the bolthole the tavern keeper had shown him. He doubted that the old bravo would do anything other than sit there and get drunk.

He had to run through the alley beside the inn to catch a glimpse of her going around a corner. She was hard to see. The darkness of night was made deeper by the jutting upper stories of the houses, and she was wearing black.

He kept running, his footfalls muffled by the mushy layers of moldering refuse that paved the streets. A woman going through the byways of the poorest part of town after dark was taking a great chance with her purse and her honor. She was either well paid or very dedicated.

Lorenzo, whispering breathless curses, twice had almost lost her in the maze before she emerged onto a wider street, the Via di San Remo. There, lights from windows made her easier to follow. Now he was quite sure where she was going, and was not at all surprised when she hurried up the stairs leading to the front door of the Palazzo Monaldeschi. The door opened. There was a blaze of torchlight, and she pulled down her scarf to identify herself. Even from across the street Lorenzo knew her.

Ana, the woman who interpreted for the Tartars.

Sophia entered Cardinal Ugolini's cabinet holding a letter written by Simon de Gobignon. It had been pressed into her hand by the French count's young scudiero when she was out walking. She had read it over and over again before bringing it to David.

He was alone in the room. As he looked up from his seat on a pile of cushions on the floor, she caught her breath. In that white light coming through the translucent glass panes, David's grayish eyes took on an opalescence.

The cardinal's cabinet on the top floor was the best-lit chamber in the mansion. When Ugolini was not using the room, David often came here to study, write, and meditate. And when neither David nor Ugolini was there, Sophia sometimes came to draw and paint.

She felt as if David were a magician, and that his eyes had cast a spell on her. In Ugolini's cabinet it was easy to think of magic. She had always associated magic with darkened chambers and cellars, but Ugolini practiced his magic at the top of his mansion, in a room with many windows.

"The long-awaited answer from Simon has come," Sophia said, tossing the opened scroll down before David.[320]

David spread Simon's letter on his lap and read it, while Sophia looked around the room. On a table near a window lay that painted skull Ugolini kept toying with. On one wall were two maps of the heavens. Sophia recognized the constellations in one of them, but the other was utterly strange. One arrangement of stars in the second map seemed to take the form of a Latin cross. She studied with interest the paintings on scrolls nailed to the walls, of plants and animals so odd-looking that she thought they might be an artist's inventions. One was a bird without wings, another a spotted animal that looked like a deer but had an enormously elongated neck. It might be pleasant to try